Well, this is unexpected. The iPhone 4G saga just got a whole lot crazier - dare I say it, a whole lot more ridiculous. Have you ever reported anything like a phone or something similarly small stolen to the police? What was their reaction? Did you ever get the device back? Did they send an army of officers to get your device back? No? Odd. They raided Jason Chen's house, and took four computers and two servers. Update: And thus our true colours reveal. "The raid that San Mateo area cops conducted last week on the house of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen came at the behest of a special multi-agency task force that was commissioned to work with the computer industry to tackle high-tech crimes. And Apple Inc. sits on the task force's steering committee." Update II: According to TechCrunch, the investigation has been put on hold while the DA ponders Gizmodo's shield defence. Update III: Some legal insight from a constitutional law and first amendment expert and a law professor. The gist? The DA has said no one has been charged with anything here, making this just an investigation - however, this makes the search and seizing of material worse. "If the police are literally just gathering information, with no suspect targeted yet, then a subpoena against a journalist would have probably been smarter than a search warranted that resulted in the front door of Chen's home being bashed in."

Actually, he dealt with lost property, not stolen, idjit lost it in a bar. If I lose my phone in a bar, it is not stolen, I lost it.

Except that by law the minute it was taken without the express intent of returning it to it's owner or the authorities, it became stolen property. Anyone purchasing that property is receiving stolen goods. They're two pretty simple laws that were broken. I agree that if it was your or my phone it wouldn't be handled this way, but I can guarantee if it was a secret prototype of something by Microsoft or Sony or Palm or Nokia they would be pushing just as hard to get to the bottom of how it all happened.

None of us here know all the facts. For all we know there could be conflicting stories about how it came to be in the hands of the person who sold it to Gizmodo, or any number of other possibilities. The bottom line is that one person chose to put the story above the law, and that's just plain stupid.

I can guarantee if it was a secret prototype of something by Microsoft or Sony or Palm or Nokia they would be pushing just as hard to get to the bottom of how it all happened.

Funny, I don't recall Microsoft, Sony, Palm, or Nokia ever getting into this sort of situation in the first place. Probably because none of those companies are retarded enough to test their secret prototypes in a pub.